All-hallown eve: Welcome to the 505th anniversary of the original pinned tweet

 

We are the antiques

 We have a mistaken apprehension of antiquity,

calling that so, which in truth is the world's nonage.

-- Joseph Glanvill

They're not innocents: The poets write what they know

 Folly and vice are easy to describe,

The common subjects of our scribbling tribe.

 

-- Wentworth Dillon

 

 

Why you are here

 The beams of light had been in vain display'd,

Had not the eye been fit for vision made;

In vain the author had the eye prepar'd

With so much skill, had not the light appear'd.

-- Richard Blackmore (1654-1729)

COVID-19 picked-off two already ailing Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod institutions of higher learning in New York and Oregon in 2020-2021

The Concordia University system must brace for yet another closure. Concordia College New York, a small, Lutheran liberal arts college in Bronxville, N.Y., will close this summer, it announced Thursday. ...

Concordia’s closure announcement leaves only six institutions in the Concordia University system. It began to shrink eight years ago, when Concordia University Ann Arbor was annexed by Concordia University Wisconsin in 2013. Five years later, Concordia College in Alabama, a historically Black college, closed due to falling enrollments and mounting debt. Concordia University in Portland, Ore., announced in February that it would close, citing a challenging and changing higher education landscape.

-- Inside Higher Ed, January 29, 2021 

For other college closings across the country since 2016, see here.

Vladimir Putin says the West is Satanic for rejecting moral norms

Putin says U.S. created nuclear PRECEDENT by bombing Japan and vows to 'smash' the 'satanic' West

Exhibit A, which you would never have seen in the popular press even 20 years ago:

 

When thoughts weigh heavy

 His pensive cheek upon his hand reclin'd,

And anxious thoughts revolving in his mind.

-- John Dryden